Butler's Cinema Scene

“PROJECT NIM” My rating: B+ (Opening July 29 at the Glenwood Arts)

93 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13

We humans are an arrogant lot. Exhibit A is James Marsh’s “Project Nim,” a devastating documentary about a monkey.

Not just any monkey, but a chimp named Nim who in the mid-70’s was the celebrated subject of an experiment  in primate intelligence and the eternal question of nature vs. nurture.

Shortly after his birth in an Oklahoma primate research facility, Nim was taken from his sedated mother and given to a wealthy New York family to raise as their own child.

The creator of this experiment, Columbia University psychologist Herbert Terrace, wanted to see if a chimpanzee reared as a human could learn to speak in sign language. How great would it be if an animal could tell us what it’s thinking and feeling?

Nim’s new mother was Stephanie LaFarge, a laid-back hippie type (and briefly Terrace’s girlfriend) now married to an aspiring poet who came from old money. Stephanie presided over the couple’s combined families; Nim was just one more “kid” in a Manhattan townhouse crawling with them.

Stephanie breastfed her hairy baby, creating an inseparable bond. There was real love there.

But as science, Terrace’s experiment was a mess from Day One. Not one LaFarge was fluent in sign language. None knew a thing about chimpanzees. None had the scientific background to do much more than deliver anecdotal evidence.

Nevertheless, Nim did pick up numerous words and learned to string them together to form crude sentences. But the whole affair was doomed to failure.

The experimenters hoped the chimp would act more human than animal. Didn’t happen. As he gained strength and sexual maturity Nim became willful, scheming and aggressive. He was a danger to the LaFarges and so was removed to a university-owned estate where he would be surrounded by a crew of signing professionals and psychology grad students.

But here was a creature accustomed to a human lifestyle, torn from the only family he had ever known. After being attacked by Nim numerous members of the team resigned.

Stephanie LaFarge and baby Nim

It got worse…much worse. Eventually Nim, who had never seen another of his species, was returned to the Oklahoma facility where he slept not in a bed but in a bare cage.

He was sold to a university program as as a test subject for new medications. The famous chimp was now in a situation where his only contact with humans would be when they injected him with serum and exposed him to deadly diseases.

Observes one of Marsh’s human subjects: “We did a huge disservice to that soul. And shame on us.”

Nim was the subject of a famous lawsuit — never before had an attorney demanded a writ of habeus corpus on behalf of a monkey — and the chimp eventually found his way to an animal sanctuary in Texas. It was better than being a lab rat, but still left much to be desired.

Marsh, whose last film was the Oscar-winning “Man on Wire,” tells Nim’s tragic story through scads of film, video and still photos taken while the experiment was underway.

But just as fascinating are the interviews with the human participants, many of whom engage in a psychologically complex game of ass covering.

Coming off as particularly evasive is Terrace, who seems only to have interacted with Nim when there was a photo opportunity and who remains reluctant to discuss the moral implications of his experiment, which even he admits came to nothing.

At the other end of the spectrum is Bob Ingersoll, Nim’s late-in-life keeper at the Texas “rescue” ranch, who continued to agitate and lobby on behalf of the chimp even after being banned from seeing him.

“Project Nim” glides from the charming to the tragic; don’t be surprised if this chimp’s story leaves you in tears.

And this film could change minds. Percolating throughout is the unspoken view that wild animals are just that, that their natures cannot be mellowed by intimate contact with humans.

We may think they’re cute and cuddly and that they love us as much as we love them, but we’re doing them a disservice — and placing ourselves in danger — when we ignore the behavior bred into them by millennia of life in the wild.

| Robert W. Butler